Generating Incremental Revenue with the Route Status airModule

Summary

Like all airlines, ANA faced a difficult challenge to encourage ticket sales and capture incremental revenue throughout 2020 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a solution, ANA Americas Office chose to target their loyal customers in the United States with emails that included fares and links to airTRFX pages to drive these customers to purchase a flight. Additionally, ANA Americas remodeled their homepage to create a centralized source for all key traveler information and deployed the Route Status airModule to continuously update US-based visitors on available flights. As a result, the Route Status airModule drove USD $60,000 in incremental revenue from their home page in the first 30 days after launching.

Challenge

As travel bans and trip cancellations swept the globe in 2020, ANA saw a major reduction in ticket sales and was required to reduce their network services. As one of Japan’s major carriers, ANA provides direct flights from North America to Japan, as well as extensive connecting flights throughout Asia. With these routes either greatly reduced or cancelled, ANA needed a way to update travelers on route availability and to generate the maximum amount of revenue for their existing route service. ANA Americas turned to BTV products to engage their loyal US-based customers and drive traffic to their website where they had the greatest opportunity to convert visitors to direct channel sales while providing relevant information related to Covid-19.

Solution

The solution to ANA Americas’ challenge was to first launch a tool that would share their updated route status easily and enable direct booking. The second part of the solution would be to use Fare Marketing to drive traffic to their pages from US-based customers most likely to make a purchase. ANA Americas used the email list from previous customers who selected to receive communications via email. This email list represented the most loyal US customers, and a Fare Marketing email campaign was developed to encourage them to book available flights.

Solution: Homepage Redesign

To generate more sales from their most visited page, their home page, ANA Americas used PROS products to launch a complete page redesign. ANA Americas’ US homepage prior to the COVID-19 crisis contained a flight search panel and some Custom Fare airModules showcasing real-time fares but did not share current route availability or many additional resources for travelers. With the homepage redesign, ANA Americas chose to prominently feature the Route Status airModule, the PROS airModule that displays the current availability of routes in the airline’s network and enables direct bookings within the airModule. The Route Status airModule instantly made it easy for page visitors to see exactly what routes were currently available, or would reopen soon, and book their flight. In addition to the Route Status airModule, the ANA Americas team worked to make their homepage a centralized place for information important to travelers during the pandemic. Videos on safety and hygiene practices were placed on the homepage and ANA’s PR team began linking all press releases to the homepage to drive additional traffic

These tactics ensured that the homepage was a useful source of information for visitors and enabled travelers to determine route availability and easily book directly from the home page.

Solution: Drive traffic from the most loyal customers

Once the homepage redesign was complete, ANA Americas’ next goal was to drive more page visits to get travelers to use the Route Status airModules and the other resources they put in place. To do this, they chose to target their most loyal customers with their lowest fares for active routes. Previous customers that opted in for ANA’s emails by providing their contact information represent the most loyal customers of the airline, and as such were the choice to target with a Fare Marketing email campaign.

ANA Americas launched an email marketing campaign where they used Fare Marketing - including low fares in every email - in October 2020. As soon as the low fares were added to the emails there was a clear spike in page visits after each of the emails went out. From October 26th to November 20th the increased traffic from the email campaigns was more than 300% higher than it was the day before the emails were sent out.

Results

By driving loyal customers to ANA Americas’ homepage and making it easy to find available routes and fares, ANA saw in increase in homepage revenue of USD $60,000 in the first month after the Route Status airModule was launched. In October 2020, ANA’s homepage saw 9,907 page views, and in November 2020 the page 13,022, a 31% increase in views. This information, along with the visible spikes in website traffic immediately after Fare Marketing emails, shows the success of the tactics used by the ANA Americas team.

Conclusion

The redesign of the ANA Americas homepage resulted in an immediate surge in incremental revenue via the Route Status airModule. With the Route Status airModule in place, ANA was able to keep customers updated on their ever-changing network availability and make booking available routes easier than ever before. The Fare Marketing email strategy successfully led to greater website traffic from loyal customers and proved to be the most effective strategy to increase direct channel sales.

PROS Products

AIRTRFX
Create a Fare Marketing infrastructure with airTRFX. Leverage airTRFX pages to scale your site, online presence, and improve engagement.

AIRMODULES
Conversion-oriented flight search tools with real-time fares that can be deployed on any web page.

AIRSEM
Airline-specific Search Engine Marketing tools to build, launch, and manage ad campaigns with real-time fares in ad copy.

AIRWIRE
Display real-time fares on social media, emails, retargeting ads, and on any webpage with airWire. Powered by user-search data without additional calls to your GDS/Res System.